by Jacob Sannox
Away from the searing heat, Arthur turned to them all and shouted,
‘This is him. Branok, it must be. He drives the fire onward with his malice!’ Arthur roared.
‘We cannot know that for sure, sir,’ said Tristan.
‘Cannot know it? I know it! I know it, well enough,’ said Arthur. ‘First the plague and now fire. Branok will not be happy until the people have paid for what they did to his boy,’ he said.
‘And who would not wish to avenge a son,’ said Kay.
Arthur stormed forward and grasped Kay by the shoulders.
‘Charles was not his son! Not matter how deluded he may be about him, we cannot allow ourselves to forget it. Branok is deluded beyond our reckoning. Fanatical about what, a bloodline passed down through the ages? Are not all bloodlines? There have been countless injustices in this world, if you can call the execution of Charles an injustice at all, but it was not the greatest of them. Are the people of England to pay for it forever?’ His temper cooled somewhat, and he released Kay, lightly patting the man’s cheek with his open palm.
‘No, Brother. This is a madman’s folly, not a parent’s grief. Abandon your work here, and join me. Our hands would be better put to destroying the arsonist than putting out the flames,’ he said.
‘Return to your lodgings and arm yourselves. We make for the Tower.’
Attended by Gareth and Tristan, Arthur strode through the streets, busy with people packing their possessions and moving westward to escape the flames which seemed to engulf buildings faster than any could pull them down. Two nights the fire had raged now, leaping from one building to the next in those cramped and crowded streets.
When all were armed, Arthur’s company left the pair of taverns in which they had been lodging to find Merlin, unsummoned, waiting in the street.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked of them.
‘We are. It is time,’ said Arthur.
‘Then follow me,’ said Merlin.
The wizard led Arthur, Gareth, Tristan, Gaheris, Lamorak, Galahad, Bedivere, Percival, Bors, Kay, Ector, Lucan, Dagonet, Gawain, Geraint and Agravain, with the knights clearing the path ahead as they travelled south towards the river. Once there, Merlin shepherded them aboard a small craft, which Arthur supposed he had purchased, stolen or commandeered, but thought better of questioning the old man. The company crowded into the boat, Merlin pushed off, and they began to row eastward. The night sky glowed red and yellow, with banks of smoke carrying westward in the wind. The flaming city skyline struck fear into Arthur’s heart, knowing all too well what power was behind it.
The boat made good progress down the unusually quiet river until they drew close to the Tower of London on the north bank. The craft steered, seemingly with no human intervention, towards Traitor’s Gate. The watergate was down and troops stood guard, but Merlin raised his hand, and when the gate began to slowly rise, Arthur could see no reaction from the men guarding it, as though they had been turned to statues. He marvelled, as always, at Merlin’s arts, feeling not a little uncomfortable, but he steeled his heart as they passed through the gate and into the Tower, Merlin seeming to cast all obstructions aside and holding any they came across in place with the force of his will.
King Arthur and his knights stood by St Thomas’s Tower and gathered their wits before moving on. They passed like ghosts through the passages until the White Tower stood before them, menacing and majestic for all its ancient crudity.
Merlin closed his eyes and reached out both hands. With a twitch of his fingers, the Yeoman Warders thereabouts stood insensible, and the company advanced upon the White Tower.
Arthur had never been inside before, and yet he had heard the legends, and he stared harder at the mound beneath the Tower than he did at the fortress itself, wondering if it were true indeed, as the legends told, that the head of Bran, King of Briton was buried beneath the hill facing towards France, staving off invasion. If so, he had done a poor job, thought Arthur, given that the building standing over him had been built by William the Conqueror, the victorious invader from Normandy.
‘The efficacy of kings,’ he muttered.
‘Sire?’ said Tristan, and Arthur shook his head.
‘No matter,’ he said, as they drew close to the Tower steps.
‘No farther,’ said a voice from above the main door to the Tower.
Arthur looked up and saw a raven perched above his head. The king made no reply to the bird, thinking he had imagined the sound.
The bird cocked its head and peered down at him.
‘No farther,’ it cawed.
Arthur drew his sabre on instinct, feeling vaguely ridiculous as he tried to come up with a reply to the bird.
An explosion beside him, and the bird took flight as a shot ricocheted from the stone wall. Arthur turned to see Bors lowering his pistol. The knight shrugged.
Arthur turned to follow the raven’s flight and started when he saw it land at the end of a line of five people, all facing directly towards them, clad entirely in black, their faces pale. The raven fluttered its wings and suddenly was gone, replaced by a young woman, similar in appearance to the other five.
‘No farther,’ said Daisy, her words echoing around the Tower courtyard.
Merlin reached out and cast his enchantment upon them, but all six of the ravens drew their swords in unison and began to walk slowly forward, their eyes fixed on Arthur’s company, accompanied by the cacophony raised both by the fire and the shouts of the Londoners outside the Tower.
Merlin opened his eyes.
‘I cannot hold them off by my will alone,’ said Merlin. ‘They do not have living minds such as that of man.’
‘Lamorak, Gaheris, with me. The rest of you, hold them off,’ said Arthur. ‘Go.’
‘For England!’ growled Galahad as he drew his sabre and led the others in a charge down the steps to meet the ravens in combat.
Merlin turned his attention to the door. He moved close and leaning on his staff, he closed his eyes and concentrated. Arthur watched as his thirteen knights charged towards the slowly walking ravens, none of whom seemed in the least concerned about the assault.
The two sides came together in a clash of steel and thudding bodies. The first strokes were parried and the assailants pressed on as the ravens wheeled away, darting left, striking right, stabbing, slashing and feinting almost faster than the eye could perceive. None could stand up to such an onslaught that the ravens offered, none save for these knights of legend, brought back from the dead for this very purpose. Arthur’s men parried every blow and bore the force of the riposte. They took the measure of their enemies, who drifted like smoke and struck like lightning under the failing moonlight.
Joseph seized Tristan by the throat with his off-hand.
‘You have the blood of King Charles on your hands. Where is your hood now?’
Tristan drove his knee into Joseph’s hip and struck down with his pommel, smashing it into the top of the raven’s head. Joseph grunted and staggered, releasing his grip, but even as Tristan leaped to take advantage, the raven had recovered, and once more drove Tristan back.
So it was with all of them, only their instincts and their skill keeping them alive against these demons or ghosts or whatever they were that Branok had summoned.
Arthur heard a noise behind him and turned to see the door to the White Tower swing open. A dazed yeoman warder stood holding it for them and, with one final look back, Arthur said a prayer for his men as he, Merlin, Lamorak and Gaheris entered the Tower to commence their search.
Even then the Tower was centuries old, a fortress of stone and wood, its many tapestries and adornments failing to belie the simplicity of an earlier time. The Tower now housed a vast quantity of gunpowder.
‘He is here,’ said Merlin as they moved carefully through the White Tower.
Wordlessly they searched room by room, Merlin casting open locked doors and incapacitating all they encountered with a wave of his hand.
And th
en, high up in the Tower, behind a modest door, which all but Merlin had failed to notice, they found their quarry.
The door swung open to reveal a modest cell in which stood a bunk and a table. Piled books were stacked here and there. Bones and plants, candles and sigils were in evidence, but nothing so indicative of the arts practised within as Branok himself, arms raised and eyes closed, standing within a circle of salt in the centre of the room. Gaheris and Lamorak dashed forward and seized the warlock by his arms, and Arthur drove him back against the wall of the cell, his left arm across Branok’s throat and his sword raised in his right hand.
Merlin crossed the room.
‘No, stay back,’ said Branok, but Merlin laid his hand upon his pupil’s brow.
‘An end to this,’ said Merlin, and Branok ceased resisting, his eyes vacant, his mouth hanging open and his tongue lolling forward like a saliva-smeared toad.
‘Sleep now, and strike all thoughts of vengeance from your dreams,’ said Merlin. Branok’s body sagged, forcing the knights to adjust their positions.
‘Lay him on his bunk,’ said Merlin. ‘He will offer us no more strife for many a year.’
‘Will we not kill him?’ said Lamorak and instantly regretted it when he saw the fury in Arthur’s eyes.
‘No, I would not have it so, after all,’ said Lamorak in answer to himself. ‘He is defeated and defenceless.’
‘And to kill him would be murder,’ said Arthur. ‘Think before you speak.’
‘We will do to him what was done to me for many long years,’ said Merlin. ‘He will not thank me for it, but it did me no lasting harm. All of you out of the room now.’
Arthur, the chastened Lamorak and Gaheris drew back into the corridor with Merlin following on behind.
‘Go and aid the others. His familiars will yet be fighting,’ he said. ‘I will conclude our business here.’
‘Do as he says,’ said Arthur, but as the knights ran to aid their brothers, he stood back and watched the wizard at work.
Merlin closed the door, and he twisted his fingers as though there were an unseen key in an unperceived keyhole in the door. Arthur thought he heard a lock snap home. Merlin looked as though he were lifting and then setting in place a wooden beam across the door. He stood back and lowered his head and began to speak in an ancient tongue of the island, calling forth some power that Arthur could not guess. As Merlin spoke, the concept of the door wavered in Arthur’s mind, seeming to merge with the stone, and then, between blinks, it was gone, replaced with a blank wall. Merlin did not break off chanting for some minutes yet, and only when he was clearly finished, panting and steadying himself on his staff, did Arthur step forward, reaching out to touch the stone where the door had been.
But as he did so, he withdrew his hand, unable to recall why it was outstretched. Why was he approaching the wall as though to touch it?
Merlin’s weak laugh distracted him, and Arthur saw Merlin beckoning him away from the wall.
‘The enchantment is in place, for sure,’ he said, smiling his wicked smile.
Arthur did not understand until he stepped away down the passage. The door was concealed behind the image of a wall, and Branok slumbered within.
‘How long will it hold?’ said Arthur.
‘Who can tell? It is not a science, but centuries, I think. It was thus for me,’ said Merlin. ‘Curse her.’
Arthur knew better than to push on this point. Merlin’s activities between Camlann and taking on Branok as an apprentice were a mystery to him, and he knew it would remain so as long as the wizard had his way.
‘Come then, we must find the others,’ said Arthur.
He hurried back down through the White Tower and out once more into the courtyard.
The knights were standing clustered around something on the floor, some kneeling as though tending to a fallen man, some wiping blood from their blades and sheathing them.
The familiars had abandoned their human form and resembled ravens once more, strutting in the courtyard or standing, cawing, upon the White Tower or the surrounding walls.
Arthur’s heart lurched to see his brothers assembled so, dreading to find out what evil their huddled bodies concealed. He rushed down the steps, sheathing his sabre as he ran and pushed between Gareth and Bedivere. Tristan knelt beside the fallen Geraint, who, Arthur saw, had suffered a gaping wound to his chest and another in his side. Geraint, the first of his knights to die since their awakening, stared up at the night sky with unseeing eyes.
They bore Geraint away to lay his body elsewhere, leaving Branok slumbering in the White Tower, and the ravens to bide their time as they might, haunting the Tower of London until their master walked free again.
Chapter Eighteen
London – 2019
Branok returned to his old haunt atop the White Tower and looked around at London’s skyline, at its monstrous, mountainous buildings looming over the Thames, each illuminated from within like thin-skinned animals gathered at a waterhole with bellies full of fireflies. Daisy stood silently behind him.
‘When William the Conqueror built the White Tower, it was a show of force, dominating the city below it. How it pales in comparison to these behemoths,’ he said. ‘You could stand on the south bank of the river and miss the fortress entirely.’
‘Beautiful,’ she said, and when Branok turned, he saw that she was referring to all that was new, reflected in the Thames to the south. He looked up at the Shard and nodded. Progress.
Branok turned and handed Daisy a folded newspaper. She took it and examined the front page. The headline read “LEADING THE CHARGE” over a photograph of the Home Secretary, Sir John Ransome, a middle-aged man in an ill-fitting suit, caught in a moment in which he was no doubt pontificating on whatever rhetoric would best appease or enrage the masses in order to lead to a vote for the new republic, Branok supposed. Daisy looked up at him, tilting her head to one side.
‘Death or scandal, I leave it up to you, dear,’ said Branok. ‘Discredited or dead, it makes no difference to me.’
He looked at his watch then buried both hands deep into his pockets, shivering at the deep cold within his bones. Daisy took her raven form and, cawing, she took flight north over the city.
Branok closed his eyes and reached. The one he had selected was nearby.
David Bolton was still alive, but even his own family would have struggled to recognise him even a few short months after his family’s demise. Once upon a time he had carefully shaved his face each morning and worn a suit five days in every seven. Now his beard and hair had grown out, he had mauled his fingernails, worrying them down until it was too painful to expose any more of the nailbed. He still wore the same clothes he had worn when he left his wife’s deathbed months before. The Bolton family home remained intact and untouched some sixty miles away, preserved like a butterfly pinned in a glass case.
David refused to return to his house, as though crossing the threshold would allow in the reality that his family were dead. For now, it did not know. He would keep it so.
David had emptied his bank account and began to wander, ending up low on cash and without a place to stay on the streets of London. He fell into a bottle and there, damp from the vodka dregs, he dwelled still.
Branok had sensed him, sensed his pain, and reached out with his mind. Perhaps it was the warlock’s meddling, or the trauma addling his mind, but David began to diminish in his grief.
Reality had become an abstract concept as he wandered the streets, where his perceptions, both real and imagined, mingled into a kaleidoscopic alcohol-hazed view of the world. One morning he passed a shop, closed for refurbishment, and knew in all certainty that a pile of snaking carpet offcuts on the doorstep were in fact discarded guts; entrails.
On another occasion, he was alone on a platform at King’s Cross station until he was joined by a couple. They stood at the far end. The man was muscular, and the woman diminutive, her hair lank and shoulders stooped. They were both carrying shopp
ing bags from an upmarket department store. David scrutinised them both and decided their appearance suggested that this shopping trip was something of a luxury as the quality of bags did not match the couple’s clothes. Perhaps the man was annoyed at the expense. He was certainly angry about something. He stood with his arms folded and his feet pointing away from his partner. His wife, David corrected himself, noting her wedding ring.
The woman said something, reaching to touch her husband ever so lightly on the upper arm, but suddenly, violently, he wheeled away from her. His face contorted as he snarled in response. David’s sense of alarm was lessened only by his drunken state as he watched from a nearby bench.
She protested, and the man raised his arm as though he was about to backhand her across the face, then thought better of it. Instead, he snatched those treasured shopping bags from her hands. He stood peacocking, his chest puffed out as he shouted then, ignoring her frantic cry, he threw the bags down onto the rail tracks and stormed away before the impact. When they struck the rails, David jumped at the sound of smashing porcelain. He saw the woman sink to her knees, sobbing, and, driven by an unexpected impulse as the man charged by him, David walked unsteadily up the platform towards the woman, feeling a desire to reach out to her in that forlorn moment.
But his eyes were drawn to the sight of broken, scattered shards of white plates upon the tracks. David stopped and stared, filled with that familiar, knowing disbelief that he was looking at broken bones, strewn down there where the rats would later pick at them.
He broke his gaze and staggered back towards the street in search of a new bottle.
David’s makeshift home consisted of a few layers of cardboard underneath two sleeping bags, with yet more cardboard pulled across him.
He was just drifting off when someone grabbed his shoulder.